It's Silicon Valley's report card, an annual performance review, a bucketful of numbers that begins to answer the questions: Are we up? Are we down? Who's in? Who's out?

More than that, the SV150 provides empirical evidence of the resiliency of the valley. How's that, you say? Isn't the list a simple accounting of the public companies in the valley that are hauling in the most money?

Taken alone, yes. But what if we were to take a look at how this newspaper's 2013 SV150 compares to the list it published in 2003?

Glad you asked.

It turns out that a decade is an eternity in Silicon Valley. The land of rapid iteration is also the land of rapid evolution. This is not a place to rest on your laurels; not a place to stand pat; not a place to assume that what worked yesterday is going to work tomorrow -- or even today.

Barely one-third of the companies that were listed on the SV150 a decade ago remain on the list today. The rest have disappeared from the rankings through mergers, acquisitions, relocation, falling sales and business failures. Others have taken their places. Gone are Calpine and Knight Ridder. You'll find OpenTable, but not Openwave on the 2013 list; SunPower (SPWRA), but not Sun Microsystems.

Ten years ago, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) was the No. 1 company on the SV150, which ranks public companies by the previous year's revenue. The storied valley company had just merged with Compaq computer after a bruising proxy fight. It was charting a bold new future. Today, Apple (AAPL) is on top of the list, which probably comes as a surprise to no one. But there was a time before the iPad and iPhone. In 2003, Apple was only No. 10 on the list, with annual revenue of $5.8 billion; about 1/28th of its revenue last year and less than 1/10th of HP's sales that year.

How much can things change in a decade? This year the combined revenues of the SV150 is $677 billion, compared to $265.4 billion in 2003. Companies that now seem like they've been public players forever were nowhere to be found on the 2003 list. There was no Facebook, no Zynga, no Google (GOOG), no LinkedIn, no Tesla, no Pandora Media.

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The 2003 list, which looked at 2002 sales data, marked the debut of Netflix (NFLX) -- called Netflix.com then -- and TiVo, a company with a DVR device that then-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell called "God's machine." It was the year that eBay (EBAY) (revenue of $14 billion last year) posted sales of more than $1 billion for the first time; and the year that it bought PayPal.

The significant shifts in the SV150 are interesting in themselves, but they say something more. Sure, they say that success can be fleeting -- here today; gone tomorrow. But they also show that Silicon Valley's enviable alchemy of risk-taking, venture capital and deep talent pool, provides a foundation for the future. From semiconductor to personal computers, to the Internet, to social networking, to the cloud and big data; the valley has a way of doing things that ensures survival and encourages success. The valley not only embraces new markets, it creates them.

Which raises an intriguing question: What will the SV150 look like in 2023?

Paul Saffo, a futurist, academic and a managing director at Discern, a San Francisco analytics firm, says the way to go about envisioning the 2023 SV150 is to start talking about new ideas that are gaining traction now.

"Ten years ago, the whole thing of online universities didn't exist," he says. "I'd be very surprised if there wasn't an online university that was well up into the 150. I'd be really surprised if there weren't robotic automobiles up there as well."

True. When you're living in a time during which your freeway commute can include running into one or two robotic cars (not literally, of course), you've got to figure that commercial versions are not far behind. Likewise, Saffo looks at a company like 23andMe, which lets mere mortals analyze their DNA, and figures a personal genomics company is a good bet for 2023. The maker movement, which comes to life at the annual Maker Faire and at commercial outlets like TechShop, is well into building a new business paradigm that's likely to spawn a 150 candidate, Saffo says. And given the growth in the field of commercial space (think SpaceX), it's reasonable to conclude that the sky is the limit in that field.

Given all that's transpired, you'd be forgiven for thinking the same is true of Silicon Valley -- year after year and SV150 after SV150.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.